[MPlayer-users] Semi-OT: NUT

[The Wanderer]

Rich Felker wrote:

> On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 12:24:15AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Ivan Kowalenko wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello. One of the things brought up in the recent überthread were
>>> the failings of OGM, and MKV as alternatives to AVI. One thing
>>> that was brought up was NUT. I've tried to do some research on
>>> NUT, but the information seems rather scarce, as do proper tools
>>> for working with NUT. The MPlayer documentation has only a small
>>> paragraph, and the NUT homepage has even less.
>>> 
>>> I'm wondering, where can I find some legitimate NUT tools?
>> 
>> Fully spec-compliant NUT tools have not been released, and in fact
>> (I believe) have not been written, because the NUT spec has not yet
>> been finalized. One of the MPlayer/etc. developers (Oded Shimon,
>> wasn't it?) has been writing libnut, a minimal implementation of
>> the format, as the
> 
> Not minimal; rather maximal. It performs the advanced seeking
> operations in the guaranteed big-O NUT provides, as a test to make
> sure it was possible. :)

Okay; apparently my last understanding of the code in question was out
of date. (One of the few MPlayer-related mailing lists I'm not
subscribed to, as being over my head, is nut-devel - so any changes
which have happened since development moved over there will have missed
me. I did read and appreciate the NUT traffic when it was on -dev-eng,
but I've got too many mailing lists even as it is.)

>> spec approaches its final form; however, I don't know what the
>> current state of that code is.
>> 
>> Currently, the only way that I know of to mux to NUT is to use
>> FFmpeg -
> 
> No, the current way is libnut/nutmerge from NUT svn. The code in
> FFmpeg is incorrect and therefore disabled.

Right. I didn't remember nutmerge as being officially publicly available
(though why not I'm honestly not sure), but I didn't remember whether
FFmpeg's NUT code had been disabled or updated or simply left alone.

> However I must stress again at this point there is no official NUT.
> We were in the process of making freeze/release and other stuff
> (MPlayer release, security stuff,  Linuxtag, finals) came up and
> slowed it down but we should get back on track soon.

Good to hear, from my end.

>>> It doesn't seem that the LAVF mixer in MPlayer is capable of that
>>>  right now.
>> 
>> I'd be rather surprised if it had been...
> 
> lavf muxer in mencoder is broken... (for all formats not just nut)

It can still work, sort of, for some purposes - but it's not nearly as
robust as any of the other MEncoder muxers, or as muxing using FFmpeg
directly.

It's a very nice idea, and a very desirable feature, but apparently
rather harder to implement correctly than it seemed.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.